Hörverstehen, two playings: “cut” is not “cancelled”
Hörverstehen, GK, 20 minutes, two playings of a four-minute podcast extract about a city's bike-sharing pilot. The task sheet has eight true/false/not-stated items and a note-completion grid with five gaps. Jonah hears: “The pilot was initially extended by six months, but the number of docking stations was cut from forty to twenty-eight after the operator's contract was renegotiated.” Item 4 reads: “The pilot has been cancelled.” He ticks “true”, because he remembers the words “cut” and “ended”. Gap 2 reads “Docking stations: reduced from 40 to ____”; he writes “28”, then crosses it out during the second playing, although he hears “twenty-eight” again, because he is suddenly unsure whether the forty referred to stations or to bikes. For an item about the cost of the scheme, which the speaker only hints at (“you can imagine what that did to the budget”), he also ticks “true”.
1. Was Jonah right to tick “true” for item 4? Reconstruct the reasoning that leads to the correct answer, and explain the difference between “false” and “not stated” here.
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No - item 4 is false. The transcript says the pilot was “initially extended by six months” and that the number of docking stations was “cut from forty to twenty-eight”. “Extended” is the opposite of cancelled, and “cut” takes the number of stations as its object, not the scheme.
Jonah's error is lexical, not attentional. He stored the evaluative feel of the passage - something was reduced, a contract was renegotiated, the speaker sounds lukewarm - and then reconstructed a stronger proposition than the text actually made. Under time pressure the brain upgrades “reduced” to “ended”.
False versus not stated. The test is whether the proposition is stated and whether the text supports it. Here a sentence directly contradicts the item, so the answer is false, not “not stated”. “Not stated” is reserved for items the text neither affirms nor denies (e.g. “The scheme is popular with tourists” when tourists are never mentioned). A practical check: turn the item into a question - “Has the pilot been cancelled?” - and hunt for the one sentence that answers it. If that sentence contradicts the item, tick false; if no sentence answers it, tick not stated.
2. What should Jonah do with gap 2, and how should he use the second playing differently?
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Gap 2: keep “28”. He heard the figure twice and the first playing gave him the full construction “from forty to twenty-eight”, where “forty” and “twenty-eight” are both objects of “docking stations”. His doubt is about the referent of forty, not about the number, and that doubt is resolved by the syntax: “the number of docking stations was cut from X to Y” can only have station counts in both slots. Erasing a supported answer during the second playing is the classic Hörverstehen self-harm: the second playing is for confirming and for filling blanks, not for re-litigating answers already grounded in the text.
How to use the second playing:
- Before it starts, mark uncertain answers with a symbol in the margin and leave genuinely blank gaps blank rather than guessing.
- During it, listen for your marked items only; the passage is linear, so you can anticipate where each answer sits.
- Write the word you actually hear, in the form the gap requires (noun, number, verb form), and check spelling afterwards - spelling errors cost marks in note completion.
- Never change an answer unless you hear a word that contradicts it.
3. Jonah ticked “true” for the cost item on the basis of “you can imagine what that did to the budget”. Explain the inferencing error and formulate a decision rule for true/false/not-stated items.
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The error: inference treated as statement. The speaker presupposes that renegotiation affected the budget but never states a proposition about cost - no figure, no claim that the scheme is expensive, no comparison. “You can imagine” is an invitation to infer, and an invitation is not an assertion. In true/false/not-stated tasks the unit of judgement is the proposition on the sheet, not the impression the audio leaves.
Decision rule:
- Read the item and identify its precise claim (who, what, how much, compared with what).
- Find the sentence that would settle it.
- If the text asserts it → true. If the text asserts its negation or something incompatible → false. If no sentence settles it → not stated.
- Treat speaker attitude (“unfortunately”, “you can imagine”) as stance, not content.
- Distrust items that feel obviously true from general knowledge; they are usually the “not stated” traps.
Applied here: no sentence contains a cost claim, so the correct tick is not stated. If the speaker had said “the scheme ran 40 % over budget”, the item would be true.